Five Years On

Al-Qaida’s 9-11 planners and hijackers believed audacity and vicious execution would minimize the risk of failure. The 9-11 commission demonstrated the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies had traces and hints of the plan, but failed to see the larger patterns. Still, an insightful, imaginative analyst might have made the intuitive leap and guessed al-Qaida intended to turn commercial aircraft into suicide ICBMs. Al-Qaida took the chance its evil design was simply too outrageous for imaginations pinned by bureaucratic regimens.

Al-Qaida also relied on American lassitude. Al-Qaida had declared war on America, but America ignored it. Americans simply didn’t want to be distracted from their pursuit of happiness. Al-Qaida’s 9-11 hijackers would leverage American complacency and exploit America’s freedom of movement to board aircraft.

Al-Qaida also relied, to a degree, on cowardice. Al-Qaida’s own agit-prop interpretation of the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia in 1993 gave it confidence in American cowardice.

Al-Qaida’s May 24, 1994, "Third Letter to Africa Corps" said: "The Somali experience confirmed the spurious nature of American power and that it has not recovered from the Vietnam complex. It fears getting bogged down in a real war that would reveal its psychological collapse at the level of personnel and leader."

But 9-11 revealed a heroic America, with the pinnacle of heroism the self-sacrifice of Flight 93. The passengers on Flight 93 confronted the hijackers. Passengers learned their jetliner had become a terrorist ICBM, and they counterattacked. Flight 93 crashed, but it did not strike its ground target.

Flight 93’s counterattack is the moment al-Qaida’s luck began to sour. That’s the moment America went on the offensive, against al-Qaida and the dysfunctional political systems that helped create it.

Al-Qaida’s "Afghanistan trap" failed. Afghanistan was designed to be the battle that launched Osama bin Laden’s "globalized war of Islam against America." A U.S. military defeat in the Himalayas would signal "Divine Sanction" for al-Qaida’s project, and make al-Qaida a global power within Islam. American victories on Afghan battlefields muted the notion God was on al-Qaida’s side.

And America has continued to have success.

It may not look that way, for the "metrics" in the War on Terror don’t conform to World War II-type shifts in geographic frontlines and casualty counts, but in the midst of WWII the metrics of battles and miles also lacked certainty.

"Asymmetric" war has "asymmetric" metrics. One measure is the lack of a second 9-11 on U.S. soil. We’ve indications al-Qaida and its affiliates have tried. We’ve experienced minor terror attacks — for example, the "sudden jihadi" who smashed his car into passersbys in North Carolina.

Islamo-fascist terrorists have murdered en masse from Bali to Madrid, but there’s been no second 9-11 in America. Perhaps Rickey’s residue has played a part, but we’ve also gotten smarter. It’s not simply the inspection regimen. The passengers know the stakes, and the passengers are at war.

American-led offensive action has also taken the war to its source: the politically dysfunctional Middle East. That’s by design. A terrible yin-yang of tyranny and terror afflicts the Middle East. Defeatist hotheads who natter about "root causes of terror" must understand the taproot of terror is tyranny, not poverty.

Iraq’s free elections and its new democratic government — by design — offer an alternative to the tyrants’ and the terrorists’ violent dynamic. Sept. 11 was an "asymmetric" terror attack on a "conventional" America. Iraq is "asymmetric" offensive political action led by America, an offensive designed to empower Middle Eastern societies that will police terror, not promote it.

In July of this year, Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appeared before a joint session of the U.S. Congress and said, "Iraqis are your allies in the war on terror."

The violent dynamic isn’t broken — but Arab Muslims are now fighting for their own freedom. Five years after 9-11, that isn’t a design, but a fact.